Huddle Unveils Secure Publishing Platform

Some document management providers have platforms predicated on sharing links. A Huddle official says his company has a "much broader vision."

Huddle today unveils its secure publishing platform that comes with a full analytics dashboard and helps enterprises measure, track and interact with the files that they share and publish. These capabilities complement its existing intelligent recommendation engine.

"There are players, such as Dropbox and Box, that are all about sharing links," Stuart Cochran, CTO of Huddle, told CMSWire. "For these vendors, the link is the key piece of the puzzle. The link can be previewed, downloaded, emailed, etc. Our vision for a secure publishing platform, as compared to just 'sharing links,' brings a much broader vision."

And That Vision Is...

"Huddle's new secure publishing platform allows a user with the correct permissions to publish a file, work on it at a later date if required and then choose when to re-publish it," Cochran said. "Publishing can be revoked either temporarily or permanently and then re-enabled. The link the recipient uses stays the same so readers don’t have juggle multiple links to the same document and know which is the latest version."

Through the platform, Huddle officials say enterprises can publish final, read-only versions of documents to a secure audience and monitor all activities around the files. Once a document has been through the team collaboration stages, is final and ready to be shared across an enterprise, Cochran said, that is when Huddle’s secure publishing platform comes in.

"When you’re ready to share," he added, "you’ll have the option to share enterprise-wide -- as opposed to sharing with colleagues at a workspace level. Clicking on this option will create a link and enable you to share this -- along with a message -- to everyone across your organization."

Cochran said Huddle's platform combines secure publishing with analytics and insight into the effectiveness of their content and how it’s being consumed. Huddle’s clients include Williams Lea, Go-Ahead Group, Keolis, Beats By Dre, Concentrix and Driscoll’s. Huddle’s secure publishing platform and analytics platform will be available early 2015.

The new capabilities are all part of Huddle's platform as a whole. They can't be purchased independently. The Workgroup pricing package is $20 per user per month. The Enterprise package is $40 per user per month and the Unlimited package is priced on application.

What's Up With Your Content?

"We feel it’s vital for the publisher to have full insight into what is happening with their enterprise content," he said. "Now, you’ll no longer need to look through email notifications or audit trails. Publishers will have a dashboard metrics that are important to their business: Has the document been viewed? How many have viewed it? Who has, and has not, viewed it? Have users acknowledged reading it? Such analytics dashboards are commonplace in CRM and Marketing Resource Management software, but not in the enterprise content and collaboration space."

Who benefits in an organization from the platform? The new publishing feature is particularly useful in situations where policies, bulletins, manuals, changes to terms and conditions or procurement documents need to be updated, Cochran said.

"We want to provide publishers with intelligence around their content," Cochran said, "so that they can work far more efficiently and improve their content in the future."